This piece was first published in Quarto’s 2023 Spring Print Edition.
Illustration by Watson Frank
[Cumulonimbus in the shape of]
A hand came down from the sky — fingers short and plump and divine, nails trimmed to
sapphic efficiency.
The hand was giant, outstretched like roots of a redwood, supported by an arm that leaned on
clouds with all the ease of one resting on the rim of a fishbowl.
A hand came down from the sky and reached through the side of the math department building:
bricks toppled with reverence, glass shattered in a tittering, and we the poor souls in Calculus II
were glued with mesmer to our seats.
After a rest, the fingers began to flutter in cyclic rhythm — like wooden horses on a carousel,
thought one student; like wooden oars of a Viking ship, mused another — and a handful of us
shot up. We looked around the room, our small smiles propped by condescension. How
embarrassing for them, we all thought, the hand is clearly calling to me.
But the hand was uninterested in our individual visions; the hand motioned us all forward. We
climbed on, dreams of protagonism jostled, and sat criss-cross in the palm’s eroded grooves.
[I’m Nobody! Who are you?]
In skillful steadiness, the hand wriggled out of the architectural carnage and returned to the sky.
The journey was long; as we were lulled beyond atmosphere, some feared suffocation, others
implosion, but all we found was a nice view of the stars and a chilliness that made us wish for
autumn coats. We squinted as the earth became a droplet on the canvas of our voyage, and
found a hazy separation between our eyes and the galaxy.
It’s kinda like being high, said one of us. It’s kinda like being sad, said another.
[THE FOOL]
The hand became our Pangaea; which is to say, the hand sang with us in tectonic shifts,
corporeal eons siphoned into chorus.
The hand spoke to us in palm readings. We learned the craft together, pooling our memories of
cloud-gazing and poems and tarot spreads to draw meaning from her
ever-changing topology.
Gretta Kissell (they/them) studies English and psych at Columbia. You can find more of their work in Blacklist Journal and The Manila Magnolia.